SMB: The place to be

At the onset of 2012, I laid out my goals as the new Citrix Americas Channel Chief, which included a larger investment in the SMB market. In July, I informed you that as part of that commitment no Citrix field resources (Sales Reps, SE’s, etc.) would be compensated for SMB sales, and the partner community would become our sole field based sales team for all SMB business.

Now, I want to tell you about a new SMB Edition that Citrix has developed that helps our partners sell to new and existing SMB customers. This is a suite of products specifically designed by and for SMB customers, catered to how they purchase. It bundles VDI-in-a-Box, XenDesktop, NetScaler, ShareFile and support for companies with 25+ and 50+ users. For those who purchase the bundle designated for more than 25 but fewer than 50 users, XenDesktop will be replaced by the simpler to manage VDI-in-a-Box solution. The price for each package is $6,600 for the 25-user bundle and $21,000 for the 50-user bundle.

The new SMB packages were created as the result of learnings from the past three quarters of partner selling in the space. While we have seen our partners have great success with SMB customers, we wanted to provide the added assistance to make the process even more fluid. We have also been encouraged by sales growth in the past year and wanted to sustain that momentum. In our observations, SMB sales have grown 38 percent year-over-year between 2011 and 2012, and we predict the same sustained level of growth for the future with roughly 40 percent growth between Q1 2012 and Q1 2013.

With the announcement of the SMB suite, we’ve also made two key program changes for the SMB space. First, the SMB suite will carry an additional five percent margin for partners. Simply put, this means more margin and money in the wallets of our partners for selling the SMB package. Second, we’ve lowered the Citrix Advisor Rewards threshold from a minimum of $10,000 down to $2,500. This makes it much more profitable for our partners to sell in the SMB space. These changes are directly tied to input and feedback from our partners.

To help lead our efforts with partners in the SMB space, we have appointed John Hurley, a 15-year Citrix veteran, to be Director of SMB Sales and Strategy. In this capacity, John will develop sales strategies specifically for the SMB market and for partners, and will work closely with Americas partners to jointly drive our SMB solutions and strategy.